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“Ugh, I hate math,” Marinette whined, her chair balancing precariously on two wheels as she leaned as far away from her homework as possible.
Adrien chuckled, looking up from where he was studying on the chaise. “It’s not even math, Mari. It’s bio.”
It was one of those rare days Adrien was given the afternoon to himself, away from his father’s overbearing nature. With no photoshoots or fencing or Mandarin lessons, his father had no excuse to keep him locked away in his tower– although Adrien wouldn’t put it past his father to make one up. Perhaps his only real saving grace was that he had promised his plans for the afternoon involved zero fun and would be entirely dedicated to studying biology with friends. At least, the plan was to study with friends plural , but Alya and Nino had dropped out last minute to go on a quote, “long overdue date on the opposite side of the city, far away from anything academic.” With mid-year exams finished and the stress of studying for them over and done, Adrien might have believed the excuse, had Nino not thrown a wink his way as the couple left. That’s when he knew it was a setup.
“Last time I checked, squares were a staple of geometry,” Marinette insisted, turning to Adrien with an unfairly cute pout on her lips. Adrien tried not to blush as her brilliant blue gaze lingered a moment more before she turned back to her worksheets with a huff, the front wheels of her chair clacking against the wood as she bent over the desk. “Squares and percentages,” she grumbled, “Where’s Markov when you need him?”
Adrien let go of the breath he was holding. Falling for Marinette had been easy. So easy in fact, he never realized it until Kagami forced him to confront his feelings. Maybe it had been because his experience loving Ladybug was so over the top and impassioned, but Adrien never knew that falling in love could be so soft. It was like basking in the beauty of the drifting cherry blossom petals; every quirk, every trait, every part of Marinette he admired was a flurry of pastels dancing in the breeze. Finally the wind had died down, the ground was painted pink, and he’d been able to see his feelings with renewed clarity. All at once, the fallen flowers had new meaning.
He remembered calling Nino later that night. “I’m in love with Marinette!” Adrien had blurted out, as soon as the call was picked up.
There was a loud silence. “Congratulations,” Nino finally said, “you’re the last to know.”
The confession to Nino had been immediate, but he still had yet to tell Marinette. Even now, as Adrien watched her frown adorably at the homework in front of her, twirling her loose hair around her finger, he couldn’t find the courage to admit his feelings to her aloud. It had taken months upon months for them to reach this point in their friendship. For so long, every interaction between them was strained with an inexplicable tension that submerged their relationship in uncertainty, but now, she met his witty quips with her own banter and they’d spend their free evenings chatting over the phone until 2 AM since neither of them were good at sleeping. Every second Wednesday they’d see a movie and walk home together, sharing their commentary on the film or being playfully aggravated by the akuma that interrupted it. He was the first to see her newest designs and she was the only one who knew his real feelings about working for his father. He couldn’t lose what they had, and confessing could destroy it all. So he kept quiet, admiring her from afar.
Marinette’s frustrated sigh brought him back down to reality. She glanced over him with pleading eyes. “Help, please?”
Immediately, Adrien tossed his textbook to the side and hopped to his feet. He cringed internally at his excessive enthusiasm and hoped Marinette didn’t think anything of it as he slid behind her to take a look at the worksheet. He arched his eyebrow at the paper. “I thought you were joking about the squares,” Adrien thought aloud, remembering that he’d finished this particular set of questions in class, “but you really are only on the first assignment.”
“Well, not all of us are junior Einsteins,” Marinette joked.
Her teasing tone, however, was lost on Adrien.
“Oh, Marinette, I swear I wasn’t criticizing or anything- everyone works at their own pace!” Adrien winced as he thought over what he said. “Not to say that you’re slow or anything- you're not! You are seriously one of the smartest people I know. Everybody gets stuck on one subject or another. That has nothing to do with intelligence. In fact-” Adrien jabbed his fingers at Marinette’s worksheet- “topics like punnett squares aren’t even a valid measure of intelligence, since the practical use of the simplified methods we’re learning is so limited and, in reality, there are so many factors-”
Marinette’s light-hearted laugh broke through his rambling. Adrien felt his cheeks heat up and he buried his face in her hair out of embarrassment. “You were joking, weren’t you?” he groaned, his voice muffled.
His answer came in the form of more bubbling laughter.
Adrien sighed, picking up his head. “If I ever word vomit like that again, please , spare my poor heart and let me know that I didn’t actually hurt your feelings.” He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, hugging her tight for emphasis. “Apparently, after 4 years of going to public school, I still suck at social cues. Adrenaline levels? Through the roof right now.”
“I don’t know,” Marinette began mischievously, spinning around in Adrien’s embrace to face him. “I find your panic quite endearing.”
With a wink, she twisted back around to her desk, for which Adrien was very thankful, since his face was flushed bright red.
“Anyways,” Marinette continued lightly, “I’m like the queen of word vomit, so you’re all good here. Now, if you could explain how to do this in a way I can understand, I would be forever grateful, Professor Agreste. ”
Adrien chuckled, headbutting Marinette’s shoulder. “Of course.” He cleared his throat and took a closer look at the problem at hand. “So punnett squares are used to predict the possible genotypes of an organism based on the parent organisms’ genotypes. Each genotype will have two alleles, represented by the letters.” He pointed at a pair of letters filled out in an example problem. “One allele will come from one parent, and the other will come from the second parent.”
As soon as the word ‘allele’ came out of Adrien’s mouth, Marinette’s head was slowly falling back against his chest until Adrien could get a full view of her slow blinking. Adrien blinked back at her.
“I did say ‘a way I can understand ’ right?” Marinette asked.
Adrien sucked at his teeth. “Right.” He blew a puff of air from his mouth. “Okay, well you know what chromosomes are, right?”
“The ‘X’ looking things, yes.”
“Ok, well those are basically just DNA strands kind of zip tied together at a region called the centromere, and if you pull them apart, you have two DNA strands.” Adrien tried to use his fingers as a visual aid, but had to stop when pulling apart the chromatids hurt his wrist. “Each strand of DNA can be sectioned into sequences called genes, and genes will code for a specific genotype for… some bodily feature.
“Now, genes,” Adrien continued, seeing as Marinette’s eyes had not yet clouded over with confusion, “can come in different forms, coding for different phenotypes , the stuff you actually see on the macroscale, and these different forms are called alleles.”
Marinette was finally nodding in understanding. “One gene, or allele, on each side of the ‘X’, meaning two genes for a genotype. And phenotype… okay that all makes sense, but I don’t understand how dominant genes aren’t always passed down if one of the parents have it. It’s
dominant
isn’t it?”
“Well, dominant only means that the trait will be expressed over a recessive one, not that the gene will beat out any recessive gene in the pool when they’re being passed down to offspring. That’s just a random lottery, and the punnett square serves to explain and quantify that lottery.”
“Oh.”
Adrien could see he was losing her as Marinette stopped her ADHD foot tapping and started to slump forward. “Here, let's look at the example,” Adrien decided. He rounded her chair and crouched down beside her, figuring Marinette would be more inclined to listen if she could see him. “Here we have two parent plants, both with heterozygous genotypes, meaning the alleles are different. There is one dominant allele that codes for a smooth seed and one recessive that codes for a wrinkly seed.”
As he explained, Adrien filled in the pre-printed square. Across the top, he wrote ‘S’ and ‘s’ above their own column, and on the left side, the same letters, each in their individual row. “Now if you look at the cross sections and combine the allele labels for the column and row, you will get a new genotype which represents a genotype possibility for the offspring.”
He worked downwards, starting with the ‘S’ column, writing the combined genotype based on the intersection of the column and row, occasionally glancing at Marinette to ensure she was still paying attention. Once all four boxes were completed, he circled the square displaying ‘ss’ and wrote ‘wrinkly’ to the right of it. “Here, we have two lowercase ‘s’s, which represent two recessive alleles. So despite both parents carrying one dominant allele and having the dominant ‘smooth’ trait themselves, if the offspring hits the ¼ odds, it will have a recessive, ‘wrinkly’, phenotype.”
Adrien clicked the ballpoint pen before turning back to Marinette, who had furrowed brows and was looking at him through the corner of her eye. Suspecting his crash course had failed, he leaned forward anyway and asked, “Does that make sense?”
Marinette flashed her gaze back to the worksheet but didn’t make any movement forward. She inhaled. “I.. I guess? Maybe?” She sighed. “I don’t know Adrien, it’s just hard to picture with the examples they’re giving. Like why do I care if a seed is wrinkly or smooth?”
“Fair enough.” Adrien tapped the pen on the desk, thinking, letting his gaze travel over Marinette’s desk before resting on two post-it notepads. One was a pale green and the other pastel blue. An idea came to mind.
“How about we try a more relevant example?” Adrien reached across the table to grab the blue post-its. “Eye color.”
Marinette snorted. “You could’ve just used my notebook,” she pointed out, gesturing to the untouched spiral notebook on her lap.
Adrien shrugged and continued scribbling out a quick punnett square. “So, your dad has green eyes and your mom has blue eyes,” Adrien began, making a crude drawing of an eye above and to the side of the empty square and labeling the colors accordingly. “Because your mom’s phenotype is blue eyes, and blue eyes are a recessive trait, she must have a homozygous recessive genotype, which we’ll represent with two lowercase ‘g’s.”
Adrien wrote the ‘g’s on the side of the square. He looked again at Marinette. “Now, knowing that you have blue eyes, and that you need two recessive alleles in order to have that trait, what can you conclude about your dad’s genotype?”
Marinette tipped her head. Adrien could almost see the connection being made as her eyes lit up. “He needs to carry a recessive allele. And because he has green eyes, he has to be heterozygous!”
Adrien smiled as Marinette wiggled happily in her seat. “Exactly.” He offered her the pen and she dove right into filling out the rest of the square.
He watched her with subdued pride, trying not to overshadow her own triumph with his. No one but Marinette knew his ambitions of becoming a physics professor, and while he was simply helping a friend learn biology at the moment, it made him warm inside to know he was capable of teaching. Marinette always made him feel special without trying; it was one of the many reasons he loved her. One of the fallen petals.
“Boom! 50/50!” Marinette cheered, slamming the pen on the table. She turned to him and beamed.
Deciding to tease her, Adrien stuck his nose up in the air and stroked his nonexistent beard as he scrutinized her work. Marinette had in fact filled it all out correctly, resulting in two homozygous recessive genotypes and two heterozygous. “Excellent work, my pupil,” Adrien said, adding a rasp to his voice to imitate an ancient and wise master.
Marinette bowed slightly in her seat, a smile pulling at her lips as she met Adrien’s dramatic energy. “I could never have succeeded without your teachings, O Great One.”
The two of them laughed and Adrien had to prevent himself from leaning over to kiss Marinette’s cheek. She was just so beautiful when she laughed.
After Marinette calmed down, she turned back to the post-it in thought. “What about you?”
“What about what?” Adrien asked and Marinette nodded at the note as an answer. “Oh, well” –he grabbed another post-it note and began another punnett square– “my father has blue eyes and my mother had green. I can’t say for certain what my mom’s genotype was, but for the sake of you seeing a different punnett square, let’s say she was homozygous dominant.”
Adrien filled out the punnett square, foregoing the bad eye illustrations he had done on the first one. The results were four identical boxes. “If I’m right about my mother’s genotype, the only option for me would be a heterozygous genome. One dominant and one recessive allele, giving me” –he gestured to his eyes– “green eyes.”
Marinette bit her lip and pulled it out with a pop. “They are very nice eyes.”
Adrien pushed her face away so she couldn’t see the blush heating his cheeks. “Pfft. Flatterer.”
Luckily, Marinette laughed and turned back to her notes instead of him. “So if we were to use our genomes,” Marinette hypothesized slowly, “we’d get the same results as the square using my parents’ genomes.”
“What? You mean- like-” Adrien spluttered, “like our kids?”
“Yeah, hypothetically,” Marinette continued, unaware of the spiral she had sent Adrien into. Pulling her notebook from her lap, she laid it on top of all the other papers on her desk. She drew an oversized punnett square on the blank page, a stark contrast to the small penmanship that filled it out. “See, 50% green, 50% blue.”
“I- yeah, you’re right,” Adrien said, still reeling from the implications.
“Let’s name them.”
“What!?”
Marinette rolled her eyes and looked at him. “Come on, you’re telling me you don’t have your kid's names picked out already?”
Adrien blinked back rapidly. “You’re telling me you do ?”
Marinette laughed, but then her expression softened. “Yes. I do.” She turned back to the notebook and began to draw a figure in the empty space of the top left box, one of the green eyed results. “Emma would be the oldest. I always imagine her having a princess phase when she’s a toddler, but as soon as she turns 6, oh, full-on rebellion against all things pink. She’ll be daddy’s little girl, and be just as reckless. But brave too.”
Adrien watched in awe as Marinette illustrated a fierce expression onto her sketch of a teenage girl who was posed as if she were running. The girl’s hair, left unshaded, was tied up in a ponytail and a few flyaways had fallen into her face. Adrien could picture the blonde-haired, green-eyed girl, reminiscent of him in looks but Marinette in personality, running across a soccer field. It was an image further strengthened as Marinette sketched out a sports jersey.
“She’d join every sport she could, and stand up for all the kids who weren’t as good as the rest of their teammates,” Marinette continued with conviction. “And when she’s older, captain of all those teams. Not because she’s the best, but because she knows how to get everyone to work together, and can see everyone’s strengths even when they can’t see their own.”
Marinette finished and wrote out Emma’s name below the drawing in cursive, before bringing her pencil to the box right beneath, the second green eye box. She smiled, and then, as if she couldn’t help it, laughed as well. She began to draw. “Now Louis, he’d be the emotional middle child. Sensitive, but kind. Feels too much for everyone and forgets to think about himself, which always causes an argument between him and Emma, because she’s scared he’ll never learn to stick up for himself. But he will. Soon enough he’ll be spending his weekends at marches and protests, but he’ll always take the time to tell me about his day and show me his newest work in progress that I’ll swear will end up in the Louvre one day.”
The new drawing was a stark contrast to the first. The boy’s dark hair and kind expression provided a perfect foil for his sister. Adrien could just imagine the two of them at that age, with Louis being a year or two younger, still not confident in himself, and Emma’s strong personality constantly clashing with his. Louis reminded Adrien of himself at that age, hesitant to resort to confrontation until there was no other option. Maybe they would connect on those similarities and Adrien would help him break out of his shell and stand up for not only himself, but others as well.
Marinette wrote out Louis’ name in a rushed scrawl, with sharp edges and small mistakes, an artistic render of the boy’s own handwriting. She moved her pencil to a blue eye box and immediately began a new drawing. “The youngest would be Hugo. He’ll be the little boy who loves dinosaurs more than people. He’ll annoy the hell out of Louis with his constant stream of weird reptile facts and always beg for Emma to take him to the zoo when I finally give her babysitting privileges.”
Hugo was drawn much younger than the others, maybe eight or so, compared to Emma’s fourteen and Louis’ twelve. Despite a missing tooth, he smiled wide and Adrien couldn’t help but smile back. He’d be such a charmer as a kid, always winning people over with ease so no one would believe the stories of how much of a mischievous scamp he really was. It would be a constant battle between Hugo and his mother whenever it came to haircuts, and Marinette would have to resort to promises of gelling his dark hair into stegosaurus spikes if she could just trim it enough so it wasn’t in his eyes.
“He’ll carry his obsession a little too far in life, but eventually, it will turn into a passion for science. He’ll travel around the world discovering new species and becoming a pioneer in a new field of evolutionary studies. And all the girls and boys who called him dorky in collège will be bragging about having known him,” Marinette finished, writing out Hugo’s name in wide circular letters, with a swirl looping into the ‘o’.
Her pencil hovered over the last box for a moment, but then she leaned back into her chair. “I, uh, don’t have a name for the last box so I guess you can have that one.” She laughed nervously, cheeks turning pink.
Adrien looked at her with starstruck eyes, mouth slightly agape as he tried to form the words. “Wow,” he settled on. “That was… wow.”
“Yeah okay, maybe forget I said all that,” Marinette said. She rushed to close the notebook, pushing it away. “Thinking about it now it makes me sound insane-”
“No! Not at all!” Adrien promised, hoping it would get her to turn back to her drawings.
The way she had described them made the kids sound so real. Adrien felt he had already lived a lifetime with them, the perfect picture of a future with Marinette he had only thought about casually. She gave his fantasies form, and it only made him want to tell her how he felt even more. If there was a possibility they could have even part of that dream become a reality…
Marinette turned to him, her expression only slightly relieved of embarrassment, and Adrien’s heart sunk. He couldn’t tell her how much her hypothetical family meant to him. “I…” He trailed off, getting lost in the blue of Marinette’s eyes. He swallowed and looked away. “I think it’s sweet you have your kids’ names picked out.”
“Well,” Marinette continued hesitantly, “they’re not just my kids’ names.”
“Right.” Adrien nodded a bit too forcefully as he tried to shake himself back into reality. “Our kids. Hypothetical punnett square.”
“No I mean…” Marinette sighed and Adrien looked back at her, confused. “Okay, don’t laugh, but these names are specifically for our kids. I picked these names out when I had a crush on you back in collège.”
Adrien blinked. Once. Twice. A couple fifteen– twenty more times. “You,” he began slowly, words feeling foreign on his tongue, “had a crush on me?”
Marinette shrugged, unaware Adrien’s whole perspective of the world was being shattered at that moment. “Yeah, from, like, the day I met you.” She paused and scratched her head in thought. “Technically the day after I met you since I sort of hated you the day I first met you.”
“You had a crush on me.” Adrien thought maybe stating it bluntly would help him come to terms with it.
It didn’t.
“Yes,” Marinette responded, just as blunt.
“Do you,” he tried again, “still have a crush on me?”
Marinette laughed. “This would be a pretty lame way to confess if I did.”
Adrien’s spark of hope was extinguished as soon as it had been lit. He tried not to let the disappointment show on his face. “Heh, right.”
Was it selfish to be angry? He’d missed his chance with the most amazing woman he’d ever known because he wasn’t aware that she’d ever liked him. Couldn’t she have told him back then? Then he scolded himself mentally. Adrien had never told Marinette how he felt, so how could he expect more from someone else when he couldn’t do the same? It was his own fault he didn’t tell Marinette, and his own fault he hadn’t realized her feelings sooner.
Even so, he had to know. “What made you get over me?”
Marinette sighed and smiled sadly. “Well, I guess, I realized I couldn’t have you. I could barely talk to you because I was so love-struck, and it really wasn’t healthy for me to be so obsessed. I was anxious all of the time, making bad decisions and putting myself in uncomfortable positions in hopes of one day confessing, and it was just so much unneeded stress. I wasn’t in a good place. Then I finally let myself take a step back. I finally let you go and enjoyed our friendship for what it was, and everything became so much easier.”
All those times she had mixed up her words, or run off to avoid him. He had always known in the early days of their friendship that it made Marinette nervous to be around him, but he had completely missed the reason behind it. How could he have been so blind? Maybe there was still time to fix it. Sure, she said she didn’t have a crush on him anymore, but maybe if he could show Marinette that she could have him– and that he wanted her just as much– things could be different.
But Marinette wasn’t done talking.
“I learned a lot from loving you, even if you never knew. And when I found myself falling for someone else I couldn’t have, my experience taught me how to get through it. I just hope one day soon I’ll get over him too. It still hurts sometimes.” Her words turned to a whisper at the end, and Adrien could see tears forming in her eyes.
Adrien’s own eyes began to water, but for different reasons. Marinette was in love with someone else, and her love was killing her. If only he had known all those years ago how Marinette had felt about him. She never would have fallen for another person who she couldn’t have and she wouldn’t be hurting like she was.
But Adrien had already hurt her in his own way. He reached for her hand that was gripping the hem of her skirt. As his fingers wrapped around hers, Marinette looked up at him. His heart broke to see her so upset.
“You deserve the world Marinette.”
Marinette smiled best she could and used her free hand to wipe away her tears. She leaned in and kissed Adrien’s cheek. “Thank you, Adrien. I’m sorry for the depressing turn in conversation. We should probably get started on the next problem.”
“Of course,” Adrien promised, but his heart wasn’t in it.
Every reason he had for loving Marinette now stung him like a poison barb. The petals had looked so beautiful as they fell, but as he lifted his gaze he realized the branches were now bare. It was so wonderful, falling in love– he should’ve known the feeling wouldn’t last, he should’ve known there would be consequences. He could never have Marinette. If only the petals hadn’t become reasons, if they just stayed on the tree in all their glory, he could’ve loved Marinette as a friend, and not as a reminder of what was lost.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. If Marinette could let go of loving someone she couldn’t have, he could too.